


Wonderful, Etcetera.

by VictoryCandescence



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Brotherhood, Christmas, Friendship, Fusion - It's a Wonderful Life, Holiday, Love, M/M, brief mentions of drug use, fantasy/supernatural elements, references to suicide and homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-05 00:56:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VictoryCandescence/pseuds/VictoryCandescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock thinks everyone would be better off if he had never existed, including and especially himself. When he finds himself in a world in which his wish has been granted, he begins to think perhaps even he could be wrong – but it takes an unlikely chaperone to make him not only observe, but understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One.

**Author's Note:**

> A somewhat-fusion with _It’s a Wonderful Life,_ with shades of _A Christmas Carol_ and dash of _The Little Match Girl_ for good measure. You need not have seen/read those to follow the story, however. Also, for the sake of this story, let’s say Jim is a bit more literally devil-ish. He’s been lying low for a bit longer and plotting a fatal fall even Sherlock Holmes can’t clever his way out of.
> 
>  

Sherlock is seven years old and already unruly. It is the deepest, coldest part of February and he has trudged through the snow and over the crunching, frozen grass to the edge of the Holmes estate, where its border is defined by a large pond. The relentless chill of winter has rendered the water a perfectly flat, white space amidst the trees and scrubby bushes in the between-spaces of other large, old houses. He wants to slide across it on his belly like the penguins he saw on the telly, or perhaps take precise steps so as to write his name on the surface in huge letters that people might be able to see from aeroplanes. He wonders if the fish and turtles are still alive beneath the thick surface, and makes a note in his head to remember to look it up in Mummy’s encyclopædia.

“Father isn’t going to like it when he realises you’ve gone out without permission.”

Mycroft’s voice behind him makes him startle; he’d got so absorbed in his thoughts about aquatic life that he hadn’t even heard him come shuffling through the snow. Mycroft is fourteen and thinks he knows everything, and Sherlock is worried that he just might. But Sherlock can still pinch at his belly and mimic his voice when it cracks in the middle of him speaking, and Mycroft will still turn red.

Sherlock wonders if he should tell Mycroft Father won’t realise Sherlock is even gone at all because he’s in the guest room with the housekeeper called Elsa making stupid noises again and wouldn’t be out until Mummy comes home at four. Sherlock came outside because it was annoying, and because it made him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t even really know what they were doing, just that it seemed like it might be wrong.

“I only wanted to look at the pond,” Sherlock settles on saying. “I want to walk on it.”

Mycroft looks back at the house, then out over the blank expanse for a few moments, considering.

“I saw some men walking across it yesterday,” he says. “Let’s see if we can get to the Fillmore’s bank.”

Sherlock is surprised and secretly delighted that Mycroft didn’t think his idea was stupid. It’s becoming rarer now that he’s anything but dismissive of anything Sherlock suggests. Sherlock runs out onto the ice, slipping and sliding around, giddy with excitement. He falls down, but takes the opportunity to spin on his bottom in a circle. Mycroft goes by in a blur as he takes careful steps toward where he’s spinning. Sherlock decides he wants to make it to the Fillmore’s side first, and so he scrambles up, still dizzy, and makes a break for it.  


Suddenly there is a loud crack. It echoes through the space above them, making the crows squawk and flap and fly off in a great, black rustling cloud.

Sherlock turns and Mycroft has disappeared.

Then he sees it: one red-mittened hand flail up from the ice, throwing off an arc of water that shimmers in the cold afternoon sun.

Sherlock’s heart begins to beat very hard up inside the base of his throat. But though he is only seven, he is a very smart boy. He gets as close to the hole as he can then lunges forward and slides on his front like the penguins after all, spreading himself out like a starfish. Just below the murky surface, he sees a flash of auburn hair, and when the red mitten flies up again, he catches hold and pulls as hard as he can.

Mycroft’s round, pale face breaks the surface, and he is spluttering and gasping Sherlock’s name. His other arm flings out of the dark water and scrapes across the ice. Sherlock clamps onto it, and inch by inch, manages to pull Mycroft out of the hole far enough that he can grab him by the belt and heave him the rest of the way up. He rolls out and over onto the ice, soaking wet and shivering and gulping in air. Sherlock lays next to him, willing his birdlike heart to slow again, watching both their steamy puffs of breath rise up above them and become part of the clouds in the sky.

After the adrenaline passes through them, Mycroft wordlessly grabs Sherlock’s hand and holds it tight. They sit up and carefully drag themselves across the creaking ice back to their own bank of the pond.

“That wasn’t my fault,” Sherlock says. What he means really is _Are you all right_ and _I was scared to death._

“I know it wasn’t,” replies Mycroft, and means _It’s okay, I’m fine_ and _Thank you._

As it happens, Mummy comes home later and finds Mycroft’s sodden coat hanging in the cellar, and she knows what happened without them even saying a word, as she always seems to. She begins to shiver like she was the one who fell into the freezing water, and Sherlock watches Mycroft try to calm her, until she asks where their Father was when all this happened.

Mummy looks like she is desperate to know, and Sherlock hates the feeling of wanting to know something and not being able to. So Sherlock tells her Father was with Elsa making stupid noises upstairs, and then she goes very still. Mycroft turns redder than he’s ever seen him turn before, and Sherlock thinks his brother might be ill until he shoots him a glare that makes Sherlock’s insides drop.

Mummy doesn’t shout until later, when she thinks Sherlock and Mycroft are asleep. But Sherlock listens through the doors of the library.

 _How could you, Siger? I thought you were through with all of that, and He could have died! They both could have, while you were up here with your –_

“It’s not good to eavesdrop, Sherlock,” says Mycroft from behind him, and though he didn’t hear him come down the hall, this time somehow Sherlock expected him to be there.

The next day, Father leaves. Sherlock doesn’t see much of him at all after that.

Both Mummy and Mycroft look at him differently from then on, and it doesn’t take long for Sherlock to realise there must be something wrong with him.

\---

  
Victor is strange.  


Not the same kind of strange as Sherlock, but somehow they discover their strangenesses are compatible. They even meet under the oddest of circumstances; Sherlock bears a scar on his right ankle, the crescent shape of a dog’s bite. Victor gives the bullish thing away to a friend and apologises profusely for days before Sherlock realises he means it sincerely, and finally decides he’s worth talking to. When Sherlock tells Victor things about himself Victor had never mentioned out loud, he doesn’t jeer or look at him askance like the others. He smiles, and asks mischievously, “What else?”

Victor is brilliant in ways Sherlock is not, and it’s the first time in his life Sherlock realises that there are ways to be brilliant that aren’t anything like he’s understood before. He’s creative where Sherlock is analytical, his thoughts are frenetic compared against Sherlock’s rigidly ordered mind. Victor wears all his emotions on his sleeve: laughs too loud when he finds something funny, freely weeps when he’s had a stressful day. It’s a little terrifying for Sherlock sometimes, having never been around someone so open – but he thinks that’s why he is so drawn to Victor. It’s unpredictable, and yet he never has to work at interpreting what Victor’s expressions mean.

Sherlock tries very hard not to like him. It doesn’t work.

They spend a summer at Victor’s family home in Norfolk the year they both turn twenty. Victor does not laugh or look at him any differently when Sherlock admits he’s never kissed anyone before. 

Victor just leans over and presses his lips to Sherlock’s, and after a moment pulls back again and says, “There. Now you have.”

Sherlock laughs then, and it feels like something that has built up thick inside him is being shaken loose.

“Do that again,” Sherlock says. Victor rises to the dare admirably.

They explore each other’s bodies without shame for the next month. It’s the best experiment Sherlock’s ever done –  Victor indulges nearly every curiosity Sherlock can think of, and his reactions are immediate and clear. Sherlock runs his tongue along the curve of Victor’s neck, and he shivers and gives a little moan. Sherlock pinches his nipple too hard and Victor yelps and pushes his fingers away, then tells him how to do it better. Sherlock doesn’t even get bored when they do things like this almost every day. He does get nervous though; he tries not to let on that he is, but Victor can somehow tell. He asks, _“Should I stop?”_ instead of _“Do you want me to stop?”_ because he knows which answer Sherlock needs to give him.

Bit by bit, Sherlock lets himself loosen his vice-grip on controlling his body, the involuntary noises Victor draws out of him, the throb and thrill of nerves through him, if only for a little while. Whenever it happens, Victor holds him tight against his own body, and Sherlock doesn’t feel strange at all.

In fact, it is the happiest he can remember being in a very long time.

But Victor’s father catches them one afternoon, and it ends in shouting and tears Sherlock had neither predicted nor understood the reason for. Sherlock is sent back home that very night, without so much as getting to wish Victor farewell. He sends Victor countless e-mails and even calls him on the phone, but Victor never answers and the housekeepers have been told not to let him come to speak. Sherlock feels his insides tighten and clog up again, though he tries to take solace in the fact that he will at the very least see Victor when the next semester at Uni begins.

A week before that time, he receives a letter from him, handwritten and very short.

  
_Father has transferred me to a different university,_ it says. _He said it will help to cure me. Please don’t try to contact me any more._  


Sherlock pores over it for two days searching between and behind each character for a code, a substitution cipher, a double meaning – anything that might make the words less stark and hopeless. It’s wrong, and _so stupid._ It’s a problem he has got an answer to, except the answer doesn’t make sense at all. He’s furious at Victor for believing the rubbish his father had spouted, but even more so at himself for causing the whole thing to catalyse.

He burns the letter with his cigarette the next day in the garden, watches it curl into brown ashes, grinds it into the wet grass with the heel of his black boot.  


“I told you,” says Mycroft, padding over the lawn toward him in expensive shoes. “Emotional investments are anathema to the cultivated mind. You would do well to avoid them.”

Mycroft is back at home unexpectedly; he knows his brother has heard of the way Sherlock has been acting since he was sent home from Norfolk. But it’s too little too late, and Sherlock has felt the resentment growing inside him for Mycroft for a long time. He is twenty-six and thinks he owns the world, and Sherlock is afraid he actually might – if not now, soon. His belly is gone, and so, apparently, is any tendency for him to react with visible emotion to anything.

“I cared for him,” says Sherlock, sounding both defiant and as if he is divulging a secret. It is the clearest truth and yet also a lie; Sherlock suspects _care_ is perhaps too shallow a word for what he actually felt for Victor.

“Caring is not an advantage,” answers Mycroft. It is not the first time he has said it, and it is far from the last. But it is the first time Sherlock truly understands what he means.

Sherlock learns that there must only be pain in allowing himself to become this vulnerable, and so he vows never to let it happen again. He shoves the memory of the entire summer down, far from the usual pathways of his thoughts. It pales, then fades, disintegrating until when recalled the thought of Victor Trevor brings up nothing more than a remote echo of regret and a vague explanation for the scar on his ankle.

\---

Lestrade is the one who finds him when he overdoses for the last time.  


It is September, and even in the heart of London, Sherlock can sometimes smell the scent of wet earth and fallen leaves. Mummy died a week ago. He never did apologise to her for any of the trouble he’s caused – not with Father, or with the drugs, or with Mycroft.

It doesn’t matter anymore. She’s gone now.

Mycroft is thirty-five and Sherlock doesn’t give a fuck about him, or his insidious surveillance attempts. He flips two fingers at every sleek, black car that rolls by when he comes home from having scored; he offers 20 quid for every closed-circuit camera lens his growing network of eclectic streetwise cohorts blind with spray paint. At the funeral, Sherlock tried to be maliciously delighted that his brother’s waistline had thickened again. But it just made him feel like Mycroft was irritatingly inconsistent in shifting shape, and for some reason it had only made him angry in a sort of hollowed-out way. They didn’t speak a word to each other. They didn’t need to; everything Sherlock was sure Mycroft wanted to say to him was contained in the looks they exchanged, by turns piteous and hostile and withering.

Tonight he’s in his manky flat on Montague Street, and the cocaine is singing inside his veins for the first time in months. The drugs are wonderful. They sharpen his already razor-edged mind, make the idiots tolerable for a while and numb out his useless, inconvenient _feelings_ until even when he’s down he can feel they’ve begun to atrophy. He can only hope they fall away from disuse. There is nothing but the next hit, the next case, the next puzzle for his mind to wrap itself around to keep from going mad.

Sherlock has spent the last week tearing through cold cases he’d filched from the Met’s archives. Grainy crime scene photos are tacked up on his wall and his eyes dart from one group to another. He’s solved six of them already, plus one robbery that took place on Tuesday and a hit-and-run that happened Thursday night. It’s late Friday, possibly very early Saturday and it has been exactly a week since Mummy died and Sherlock is humming with energy and high on triumph and ego. He can’t remember when he last ate or showered, or where exactly his shirt has got to, but it doesn’t matter. He’s fine, he’s better than fine, he’s excellent. He’s perfect. He’s going so fast and being so clever –

And then it’s dark.

And everything smells bitter and tastes bitter and he can’t see or lift his arms or feel and his brain suddenly goes wide and white and blank and –

It’s fucking bliss.

And then everything hurts, and doesn’t stop hurting. His veins burn beneath his itchy skin, but not in the good way he’d come to be so fond of.

“You’re a goddamned bloody idiot, kid,” says the man near his bed. He’s got dark hair just beginning to go silver round the edges, and his words drip with authority and concern.  


_Lestrade,_ his addled brain supplies.

“I am, emphatically, not any of those things,” answers Sherlock, and his throat feels raw. He reconsiders as his eyes crack open wider. “On second thought perhaps I am damned by God.”  


Lestrade gives a small, rumbly chuckle.

“Certainly seems like you were trying to send yourself to the narrowest circle of hell, amount of junk you had in you.”

“It’s not junk,” Sherlock rasps. “I mixed it myself. It was a precisely balanced seven-percent cocaine solution. I just got a bad batch, is all.”

“You do remember I’m a police officer, right?”

“Oh please. If you wanted me arrested, I’d at least be handcuffed to the bed already. You’re not that much of an idiot. You have some other reason for being here. It’s not a case, though. Pity.”

Lestrade laughs again.

“You’ve been in and out of consciousness and lucidity for the past twelve hours, and yet you knew all that with your eyes barely open. How do you even do that?”

“It’s a sickness,” Sherlock spits sarcastically.

“It’s a gift,” Lestrade retorts, and Sherlock is surprised by the sincerity of his tone, though he doesn’t show it. “Listen – your brother –”

“Oh, this day is just getting better and better isn’t it,” Sherlock interrupts, letting his head flop back against the thin pillow. “Is he here? Do me a favour and just – if any of these machines I’m hooked up to is keeping me alive, unplug it. I’d rather expire than have to see his fat, smug-faced–”

“I’m telling you, I’ve kept him out.”

Sherlock blinks at the ceiling, then lifts his head to look at him again.

“What?”

“He was trying to get in, and I told the nurses to keep him out for a few minutes so I could talk to you. I know what it’s like, brothers – sometimes you need to get your wits up before you can face ‘em.”

“You don’t know _my_ brother, Lestrade,” Sherlock scoffs. “He’s one hair’s-breadth away from actually being the human avatar of the entire British Government, and if you think that’s rubbish consider the likely anonymous call you probably got to come to my aid.”

Lestrade frowns, and Sherlock takes it that he’s got it right.

“What I mean to say is,” he continues, haughty and disgusted, “If my brother wants to get in somewhere, whether it’s a bakery or a secret underground prison, he gets in. And _especially_ if it has anything to do with catching me off-guard. You think you can hold him off from coming into my hospital room?”

“He’s obviously never been up against an overworked third-shift A&E nurse. I’ve yet to come across a person more formidable. I’ve got friends here, and from what you’ve said and the bit I’ve seen of him down in reception, I doubt he does. That counts for a lot.”

Sherlock is silent. Friendship isn’t a topic he can speak on with any authority at all. Lestrade sighs and comes round the bed to drop into a chair. He leans back, crossing his arms.

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Have friends,” Lestrade says. “Someone you call when you’re feeling low instead of pushing shit into your veins.”

“I don’t need friends,” Sherlock snaps insolently, and drops his head back to stare daggers at the ceiling and hope Lestrade has a sudden fit of spontaneous muteness.

“Yeah, you do,” Lestrade says.

“Well it’s not something I can just pop down to the shops and gather up for a few quid, is it? I work fine alone, and I always have – and it’s actually none of your fucking business, so if you’d kindly piss off that would be great.”

The itch under his skin has got him swearing and snippy, and his head is pounding so hard he fears his skull will crack right in two. Sherlock wishes his arms and legs didn’t feel so leaden, so that he could get up and unplug himself from these machines and go back to his own flat.

But Lestrade is a brick wall. And probably, Sherlock suspects, just as stubborn as he is.

“You want me to be able to let you in on my cases, you need to stop this.” Lestrade waves an illustrative hand at Sherlock, in his bed hooked up to his machines and fighting for coherence. “And I don’t just mean for the work – which is the part that _does_ make it my business. I mean, you’re a bloody genius, which you so kindly remind everyone every time you turn up at my crime scenes uninvited. But that’s only going to take you so far, if this is what you fall back on doing when that isn’t enough. You’re right. You can’t buy friends. So here’s me, offering you one.”

Lestrade holds out his hand. Sherlock looks at it, then at his face. The man is absolutely serious, and something about that makes Sherlock’s stomach hurt in a way that has nothing to do with the nausea of withdrawal.

“There’s a reason I haven’t got any, you know,” Sherlock says instead, achieving the note of petulance he was hoping for. Lestrade drops his hand down again, but his expression isn’t affronted. It’s disappointed, which Sherlock realises is worse.

“Yeah.” He stands, still looking at Sherlock. “But it’s not the one you think it is.”

Sherlock finally looks away. No one has ever wanted to connect with him on this level. Not since Victor, but even that was in a much different context. He’d been content to believe it was because he wanted it that way, but perhaps he’s been deceiving himself.

“You don’t need to like me,” Lestrade continues. “That’s fine. No skin off mine. But what I said stands – you keep this up, I’m never letting you near another case again.” Then, slightly quieter, “Don’t make me do that, because I know they help.”

Sherlock whips his head back up.

Perhaps Lestrade is much more clever than Sherlock gives him credit for.

Lestrade shrugs, raises his hand in a vague farewell and turns to leave.

“My mother died a week ago,” Sherlock blurts out. He doesn’t know why he does it, what relevance it even has to the situation, but the knot in his stomach seems to loosen when the words leave his mouth.

Lestrade stops with his hand on the door handle. He turns around.

“My condolences,” he says, and what’s better is that Sherlock can tell he means it, by the way his brows fall together and his eyes soften. Lestrade wanders back over to the chair he vacated and sits down again.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, after a long moment of silence.

“No,” Sherlock says.

Lestrade nods understandingly, his mouth a crooked downward curve. But he doesn’t go to leave again. Sherlock finds that he doesn’t want him to. Having Lestrade just sit there next to his bed, with his arms crossed and his feet planted on the floor feels like a comfort, though he’s essentially doing nothing.

A quarter of an hour later, Sherlock turns his head on his pillow.

“Thank you,” he says.

Lestrade smiles at him, small and warm. He leans over and pats Sherlock on the arm affably, then rises and leaves without another word. Sherlock feels heavy and exhausted, but all the bitter has seemed to drain out of him. He lets his eyes fall closed and dozes dreamlessly.

Mycroft comes in shortly after to loom at the end of Sherlock’s bed. If he ever did lay down his scolding, Sherlock doesn’t remember it.

He gets clean if only out of spite to show he can, and Lestrade keeps his word.

It takes Sherlock an embarrassingly long time to discover that Mycroft never did call Lestrade to come to Sherlock’s aid, and that it was in fact the other way around.

If Sherlock cared, he could also trace the beginning of Lestrade’s marital problems to that night – because Lestrade had been suspicious that Sherlock was using, he’d taken it upon himself to check up on him at such an odd hour. When he wound up staying the night at Sherlock’s bedside, Lestrade’s wife jumped to the conclusion that he was having an affair, using it as justification to begin her own.

Sherlock convinces himself he doesn’t care. He’s become very, very good at that.

\---

London is trudging reluctantly toward spring when John Watson limps into Sherlock’s life.

John is just like any other man. 

He complains about the messy piles of books and papers Sherlock makes in the sitting room, the potentially biohazardous conditions in the kitchen, the lack of use his bedroom sees. He gets angry when Sherlock runs off without him, if Sherlock gets hurt and John isn’t there to patch him up. John never listens when Sherlock tells him to leave or to run away. John always asks the wrong questions and draws the wrong conclusions, and he is frustrated and frustrating when he can’t keep up with the lightning-quick pace of Sherlock’s mind.  


But John is different, because John stays.

John is fierce and protective of Sherlock. John makes him tea and gives him hard-eyed looks until he eats the food he sets down in front of him. John hides Sherlock’s cigarettes and stays with him on nights Sherlock doesn’t trust himself not to go out looking for something stronger to thread through his veins. John apologises for Sherlock’s social ignorance, yet still shares secret smiles with him on the outskirts of crime scenes. He stands at his side in front of the looming press, looking unassuming and boring and normal, and deflects flashbulbs and questions and smooths over Sherlock’s abrasiveness.

Sherlock wonders why. The answer that comes is a question in itself.

Once, after an intense three-day-long stakeout and subsequent chase, they tumble back into Baker Street sated with victory at having caught their thief. Mrs. Hudson has left them plates of food in the fridge (triple-wrapped), and they strip off their shoes and coats and collapse in a heap leaned up against each other on the couch to eat.

Sherlock is so exhausted he gives up after three bites, lays his head back and lets his plate droop precariously on his tilted lap. He feels John get up and take the fork and dish from him, then John’s warm hands are hoisting his legs up onto the cushions. There are footsteps into the kitchen and back, and then Sherlock is enveloped in the fuzzy, threadbare warmth of the green plaid blanket that usually graces the back of John’s chair. Sherlock can barely move, but he breathes deeply in; the blanket smells like John, like home.

“Out cold,” Sherlock hears John say to himself, in a tone that indicates he’s smiling. Then he senses another kind of warmth, a soft pressure, and a little huff of breath against his temple.

In his ear, so quiet Sherlock might have imagined it, John whispers, “Sherlock Holmes, I’ll love you ‘til the day I die.” John walks away, only to pause at the door as Sherlock hears the snap of the light switch being flicked off and add beneath his breath, “If you don’t get me killed first, you git.”

\---

It is Christmastime, and for the past few days, Sherlock has decided he hates everything. This happens every now and again, and usually an interesting case (or any case at all) will be enough to distract him. Right now, however, the fairy lights and annoying music and saccharine telly programmes have compounded and increased his hatred of everything exponentially.  


John calls these times his black moods.

Sherlock will lay on the couch for hours at a stretch, dressing gown puddled around him, staring at the ceiling. Or he’ll drape himself over his chair with a sigh, plucking the same note on his violin, seeing if he can detect minute variations in the tone. All told, it’s really no different than he usually acts in between cases – which is why he finds it strange that John, who is so consistent in his inability to observe, seems to have a sense tuned specifically to the delicate shift in Sherlock’s demeanour when it tips from mere boredom into something heavier and more difficult to shake. In this respect, he is hardly ever wrong. No one, save Mycroft, has ever been able to read Sherlock so accurately.  


It is both impressive and infuriating.

“Hello?” John’s voice calls up the stairs. Sherlock hears him ascend, then the door to the sitting room swings open. He hears the rustling of paper and plastic bags and smells something savoury. His stomach turns in repulsion.

“Hey, Sherlock. I got us some dinner. Glad you’re home, I thought you might have – been out.”

John’s last few words are halting and slow to finish as he takes in the state of Sherlock. He’s cocooned himself in his chair, wrapped around the skull. One arm dangles over the floor; long fingers idly brush along the edges of the pages of an unabridged Oxford dictionary.

 _Fwip, fwip._   

“Have you eaten yet today?”

 _Fwip._

“Is it still Friday?”

“Sunday, Sherlock,” John sighs. “It’s Sunday.”

“Oh. Then no.” That explains the pain in his stomach, and the headache.

“Sherlock,” John says again, and this time, it’s more concern than exasperation. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning for Harry’s. I need to know you’ll be all right while I’m gone.”

Sherlock shifts around restlessly, sitting up. The skull falls off the chair and rolls across the floor, its mandible coming awkwardly unhinged.

“I’m not a fucking child, John,” Sherlock snaps. “I’ll be fine.”

The corners of John’s mouth turn downward, and his brow goes rigid.

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” John says, his voice taking on the strain of keeping his annoyance in check. 

“Then what did you mean?” asks Sherlock. He’s indulging his baser spitefulness, if only to put an end to his incessant boredom and mental squalour. It’s cruel, and he knows it. John has spent the better part of the week fixing up the flat to have guests over Christmas night, on top of arranging travel plans to get to Harry’s and back. Sherlock knows John wants him to be appreciative or commiserative – at the very least indifferent – but all he’s finding is an intense disdain for all the useless sentimental trappings to which John’s assigned arbitrary value. 

“I just –” John takes a deep breath, reining in his annoyance. “You know what? Maybe you’d feel better if you helped me out a bit, for a change. There’s still a lot to do before we’ll be ready for the party. Mrs. Hudson wants help with her baking, I know.”  


“Puerile.”

“Lestrade could always use a hand with the backlog of petty cases. Give you a chance to show off, at least, if they’re not up to your usual specs.”

“Tedious.”

“Why not go take those abnormal gallbladders back to Bart’s and get Molly to help you dispose of them correctly? I hear they also just got a new ultracentrifuge in, perhaps she’ll let you give it a whirl.”

“Pointless.”

“I’m just trying to give you a distraction!” John yelps, clearly at the end of his rope. “Isn’t that what you always say you need?” 

“Since when are you the arbiter of what I need?”

“It’s called being your friend, Sherlock.”  


“Well I don’t need _you,_ I don’t need any of you!” Sherlock bursts forth, inexplicably enraged. He shoots up from the chair and paces erratically from chair to coffee table to mantle, clawing his fingers through his hair. “All you do is clog up my life, slow me down, pack my brain with useless flotsam to remember like holidays and birthdays and work schedules and how you take your tea. It’s infuriating and I _hate it!”_

“So memorising tobacco ashes and bug larvae and oven models is more important than remembering our Christmas plans,” John says. “I see how it is.”  


John has gone very still where he stands in the kitchen doorway. Sherlock stops to look up and sees his tight face, the way his eyes have gone hard and his gaze shallow. Suddenly all his useless anger turns into a sick, heavy weight that presses down on his stomach and chest.

“Do you?” Sherlock asks, and though he means it to come out as a genuine question, he hears the sting of spite it still carries nonetheless, and winces internally.

“Yeah. You’re probably right too, like you are about everything else. You’re much better off without friends.”

John says it in such a cool, factual way, not allowing any trace of sarcasm or spite of his own to soften the statement. Nevertheless, it hits Sherlock in the face like a blast of icy water.

“John, I –”

“No, really, Sherlock. I understand,” John says. His back is very straight, and his voice very steady. He is looking slightly past Sherlock at the windows, glowing blue with the last dregs of afternoon daylight. “You did tell me at the beginning. Work will always come first for you, and when there isn’t any, the need for it will. Always wanting to play the game, and to hell with anyone else. We take up too much of your precious time – _I_ slow you down most of all, I know it. You think I’m what will make you fail. I just – I didn’t realise just which way the scales were weighted on that until now. If that’s how you feel, then fine. I’ll leave you alone.” 

Sherlock has never seen John look defeated. He didn’t even think it possible – but here is John, leaving the food and other bags abandoned on the table, lowering his head just a fraction, and marching up the stairs to his room without another glance at him.

Sherlock had thought he’d reached the apex of his hatred for everything.

As it turns out, he hadn’t until this moment ever felt so full of loathing.

He goes into his room and rips off his dressing gown, throwing the ball of it at the bedside table, upsetting the lamp. He doesn’t care at all. He shoves socks and shoes onto his feet and thrusts his arms into his suit jacket. He whips his coat and scarf around himself as he clatters down the stairs, ignoring Mrs. Hudson’s distant protests about the racket. He slams the door closed, just to drive home the point that he wasn’t listening. He’s forgotten his phone on purpose too, hoping John will notice and use his brain for once to infer that he shouldn’t bother with any inane _where are you_ texts.

They don’t matter. They don’t.

Sherlock walks for a long time, until his legs are sore and his feet burn and his cheeks are blotchy and scarlet from the cold. It must be nearly midnight when he finally stops to lean against a brick wall at the opening of an alleyway.

He used to always be alone. It was just him, and his mind and the next puzzle. What he said to John was true: his thoughts have become cluttered in the past two years with things that have nothing to do with his work. Nothing good had ever come of him being attached to anyone. He is worth more alone.

What John said was true too. More true than he cared to admit. But John doesn’t _understand._ Sherlock would be better off without them, and they’d be better off without him.

“I hate Christmastime, too,” says a voice behind him.

Sherlock turns around sharply. In the angular shadows of the alley, a familiar face is framed: shining dark eyes stare at him from inside the darkness, and somehow look even darker when he finally does step into the light, as if they swallow it all up like a black hole. 

“How –” Sherlock begins, but there are too many endings to that question that he wants answered, and cannot begin to choose which he wants to know the most.

Jim clicks his tongue, holds two fingers up in a silencing gesture, leaving the other cradled nonchalantly in the pocket of his expensive, leather-trimmed coat.

“Now isn’t the time for interrogations,” Jim says. “Your brother had his turn enough for both of you.” His voice every bit as lilting and dangerous as it was at the pool and in the sitting room at 221B. Sherlock has been waiting since then for Jim to resurface, and it had only added to his maddening boredom that he had all but disappeared after that afternoon, to the point where Sherlock was sure his plan was to merely watch him waste away from ennui.

“Come on, then,” Jim says, loops his arm through Sherlock’s and starts off down the pavement with him in tow.

It begins to snow.

They walk, and walk, and walk. Sherlock knows he could take his arm from Jim’s at any moment, but he doesn’t. He is compelled to keep following him, mad with the need to fulfill his curiosity about the strange man who has danced at the periphery of his life for so long, and is now leading him to the unknown, to another puzzle, another level of the game.

Yes. This is what he wanted. 

To return to the mind which he had left too long cluttered, sweep out the cobwebs and purge the uselessness. Delete, delete, delete. 

They stop.  


Sherlock looks up, suddenly aware he hadn’t been paying attention to anything but the steady pace at which his feet were carrying him along next to Jim. They are somehow atop the Tower Bridge, both standing precariously on the edge, overlooking the dark water of the Thames below as the wind and snow whip around them.

“My snipers have been busy,” Jim says, sounding like a father bragging about his ambitious children. “And so have I.”

Jim produces his mobile from his pocket. On the screen, he opens up three video feeds, one after the other. The images are grainy but unmistakable; he has three killers trained on them, one to each.  


Mrs. Hudson.

Lestrade.

John.

He stares at them for what feels like a long time, almost not believing what he sees proof of right in front of him. Sherlock has never been more terrified in his life.

“Here’s the deal, Sherlock: I can grant your most ardent wish,” Jim says. “I can make your friends disappear. Poof!” He waves his arms theatrically; his phone vanishes from his hands as they pass over each other. It unsettles Sherlock, because he is not able to parse the sleight as he is usually able to with such tricks. It’s almost as if he actually made it dissolve in thin air.

“I meant none of that,” Sherlock says, trying to shake the strangeness from his head.

“All that and now you’d go back on your words?” Jim _tsks._ “Really, Sherlock. Don’t disappoint me with your sudden lack of conviction.”

Jim circles him like prey, and comes to stand close behind Sherlock’s shoulder.

“You worry about what they’ve done to you. Ruined your perfectly-tuned instrument of a brain, rotted you through with sentiment and worry and _care._ But look at what you’ve done to them, now,” whispers Jim, “You’ve signed, sealed and delivered their deaths, just by existing.”

Sherlock can hear the smile that splits Jim’s lips rather than see it. He is dizzy and slow, the feeling creeping up on him almost imperceptibly. He thinks it must be the swaying of the bridge, or the whip of snow, or the heights – but it’s unlike any version of vertigo he’s ever felt. He swallows hard, bile rising inside him as the images of the video feeds flash imprinted behind his eyes each time he blinks.

“Imagine how lovely it would be, with them out of the way,” Jim says, his voice edged with laughter. “You’d never be bored again, I would make sure of that!”

“There must be a way,” Sherlock says, as much to keep himself grounded as to stop Jim from talking any more. “A way to stop you, to fix this.”

“There is. I just told you what you’ve done wrong, but were you listening?”

“You said nothing save that I’ve done this by existing! There is nothing that can change that.”

“Oh, but if there was,” said Jim, coming around to face him on the narrow ledge. His incisors gleam in the dim light of the city night. “Would you do it?”

“There isn’t,” hisses Sherlock through gritted teeth.

“Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock,” Jim tuts. “Did you not take my advice and learn your fairytales by heart?” The smile grows wider, more grotesque. “Are you prepared to do anything?”

“Yes,” says Sherlock, “If it will spare them, I am.”  
“Fine then,” says Jim, and the smile falls from his face, though his eyes remain wide and his voice incongruously giddy. “It’s not the choice I would’ve made, but hell is hell whether it’s here or there. What is it that the kids say? You only live once – or rather, you don’t.”  


And before Sherlock can react, Jim is grabbing his hand and striding off the edge of the bridge, with Sherlock in tow. The air is cold as it rushes past, and the water comes speeding up to meet them. Jim’s hand is like a vice around Sherlock’s and he grips tighter and tighter and tighter until –


	2. Two.

 

 

The gravestone is simple, onyx-black granite with gold lettering. Its surface shines even beneath the flat grey of the sky. Sherlock bends down, reaches out long fingertips to touch it, barely understanding what he reads.

_Mycroft Holmes_

_17 October 1969 - 21 February 1983_

“That makes no sense,” Sherlock murmurs to himself. “He would have only been –”

“Fourteen,” says a voice behind him.

Sherlock turns to find a boy sitting on top of a headstone, swinging his legs. He can’t be older than eleven, and he is barefoot, but otherwise dressed as if he’s going to church. He’s tall for his age and the sort of gangly that happens just before adolescence fully invades. He’s mousy-haired and well-freckled, with the ropiness of a lad used to running around a lot for sport. The boy hops down from his perch and walks toward Sherlock, still crouched near the stone bearing his brother’s name. He seems unbothered by the cold – but what’s even stranger is that, as far as Sherlock can tell, he makes not a single sound. No rustle of clothing, no shush of snow beneath his naked feet. 

“Who are you?” Sherlock asks, though he means _what are you?_

“Oi, your voice got deep!” the boy says, scratching his elbow and smiling a buck-toothed smile. “But your hair’s still the same, fancy that. Come on now, you know me. It has been a long time, I guess, but _I_ haven’t changed a bit.”

“I don’t know you,” Sherlock says, rising to circle the boy, gathering as much information as he can.

“Yes you do,” the boy sing-songs. “You never met me, but you know me. You were the one who figured it out, what really happened to me.”

Sherlock stops completely as it hits him.

“Carl Powers,” he says, and feels a bit lightheaded. “But that makes no sense either. You’re –”

“Dead. Yep,” says the boy with a nod. “Did you figure _this_ out yet?”

Sherlock puts a hand beneath his coat to feel his chest almost involuntarily.

“But I’m not–”

“Nope. But you did say it. And he made it happen.”

“I’m – I don’t exist,” Sherlock says uncertainly.

“Yes! Well. Sort of. I mean, you’re here. And not dead. But yeah. This is the same world, just never having had you in it.”

Sherlock feels a bubble of rage burst inside him, and lets out a frustrated growl as he feels his neck grow hot beneath his scarf. 

“That isn’t possible! Stop it, stop saying this nonsense! Did Moriarty send you? Is this part of his ridiculous trick? Tell me. _Tell me–_ ”

At this point Sherlock lunges at the boy intending to grab his shoulders and shake sensible answers out of him, but his hands go straight through him as if he is made of nothing more than light and vapour. Sherlock finds himself on the opposite side of the boy, face planted in the snow. Carl spins around, giggling a bit. Sherlock rolls over and sits up, brushing the snow from his front and wiping it off his face. He looks at Carl for a long moment, then closes his eyes and takes a very deep breath. He lets it out slowly before he opens his eyes again.

“Carl,” he says evenly.

“Yes,” says Carl, as if Sherlock has asked a question. Perhaps he has.

“My brother is dead.”

“Yes,” Carl answers, and he sounds sad now. “You know why.”

Sherlock finds that he does, if he goes by the logic of whatever reality this is. He looks up at the heavy, dark sky. It occurs to him he cannot tell whether it is dawn, or dusk, or someplace in between.

“He fell through the ice, into the pond behind our house. He would have been alone, if I wasn’t – but that day, he was only out there because of me.”

“No. He wanted to walk across the ice too. To the Fillmore’s, remember? He wanted to get away from the house as well.”

Sherlock shivers a bit, and it makes him realise he’s still sitting in the snow. He gets up and brushes himself off, goes back over to examine the stone again. He feels Carl come to stand beside him, silent as air.

“What about my parents, then? I assume my mother stayed with my father, since that was the day she found out about his infidelities.”

“For about a decade more. But your mother was as sharp as your father was shrewd; she figured it out shortly after you would’ve told her. They only stayed together so long after because of how deeply wounded she was by your brother’s death.”

“I thought I was the one who hurt her,” Sherlock says.

“Not anywhere as badly and for as long as this did.”

Sherlock lets his eyes linger over the impossibly short lifespan of his brother, chiseled there in the dark stone. He would have gone on to do so many things, important and inconsequential, good and bad. But none of it ever happened. This world not only never had Sherlock in it, it never had the influence of Mycroft’s brilliance either. Sherlock feels lightheaded and heavy-hearted just beginning to think about all that implied, and so he forces himself to stop.

“You don’t speak like a normal eleven-year-old,” says Sherlock, settling his mind back in the present.

“I’m not a normal eleven-year-old. I’ve been dead for twenty-six years.” 

Sherlock, both curious of and dreading the answer, asks, “What else?”

Carl reaches out and takes Sherlock’s hand, and the cemetery dissolves from around them in a swirl of snow and wind.

 

\---

 

When the world settles around them again, they are in front of a large, rustic brick and beam house, covered in snow and hung with twinkling fairy lights. Inside the windows glows warm, comfortable light. Pungent, earthy smoke curls up from the fireplace and fills Sherlock’s nose, triggering a hundred memories.

“We’re in Norfolk,” Sherlock says, trying not to sound incredulous. It has become apparent that he is not playing by his normal set of rules, and so decides to defer to Carl’s guidance wherever _here_ is. 

“Yes. You’ve been here before.”

“Once,” Sherlock says. “It was summer, though, and years ago. It looks different now.”

“Not by that much,” says Carl, and Sherlock has to concede that he is right, bypassing the strange feeling that he somehow knows what Sherlock is thinking, in addition to his memories.

“Does Victor still live here?”

“Yes. He inherited the house when his father died. This is his family home now.”

Sherlock’s heart makes an odd sort of flop inside his chest when he hears that. He can’t tell if it’s happiness or jealousy – just that it has some basis in sentiment. It’s incredibly unfamiliar.

“Who was the lucky fellow, then?” Sherlock asks.

“Katherine,” answers Carl, and Sherlock takes the space of a blink to realise _Katherine_ is rather less masculine than he was expecting. Just as he does, he sees two figures move inside the large picture window that frames the sitting room: One graceful dark-haired woman rises from a chair and walks out of the room just as an achingly familiar bespectacled man walks in through a different room. Sherlock’s heart does that thing again, and he begins to wonder if it’s a chronic side-effect of becoming non-existent. It’s a perfect Christmas scene, like something out of a storybook; stockings hung with care, the tree dripping with sparkly baubles, fire roaring in the hearth. But Victor looks as if the weight of the world is on his back. He sits down heavily on the sofa and lets his head fall into his hands before scrubbing at his face and running his fingers up through his hair to clutch at the back of his neck. He sits this way for some time, staring absently into the fire before he startles as if he’s heard something. He sits up straighter as the woman – Katherine – comes back in. They exchange a few words and then a obligatory-looking kiss, and Victor walks out of the room, leaving Katherine to take her turn to stare moodily around at the idyllic decor as if it was the bleakest thing she ever laid her eyes on. Then she leaves again, and the room is empty.

Sherlock tries to make sense of what he’s seen, falling back on doing what he does best.

“So it turned out he was actually –”

“Nope,” says Carl, before Sherlock even finishes the thought.

“So was she –”

“Mm-mm,” Carl shakes his head.

“So he’s still – but then why would he marry a woman?” Sherlock says. 

“Because that’s what he was supposed to do, what his father raised him to believe at the exclusion of every other option. Because he never met a boy at university who captured his attention and made him reconsider the world from a different angle. He never invited him back to his home for the summer and found out that perhaps his father was wrong about it after all.”

“But that’s a lie!” Sherlock spits. “He let his father send me away, and him as well. I ruined his life!” 

“Are you so sure of that?” Carl counters. “Because here he’s ruining more than just his. He’s ruining his own by living a lie, and Katherine’s for the same reason. She grows more resentful day by day because she doesn’t understand why he doesn’t love her, and Victor grows more depressed because he can’t admit to himself what he really feels, let alone admit it to his wife. Imagine how much worse it will be if and when they bring children into this equation.”

Sherlock’s heart begins to beat hard, this time not in fondness but a widening fear, as he begins to realise the way his life spiraled out like the concentric wave of a stone dropped into a pond, touching people he couldn’t have fathomed, even for all his considerable knowledge.

“Baker Street,” he finds himself growling at Carl. “Take me to Baker Street now.” But the boy is calm as he takes hold of Sherlock’s hand once more.

 

\---

 

“I told you already, ain’t no one livin’ here by the name of Hudson, an’ never has. Me dad owned this building far back as the seventies. Now get lost, you mad bugger!”

The balding man with a three-day black scruff on his jaw slammed the heavy black front door of 221 closed.

“I just need to look at the upstairs rooms!” Sherlock shouts through the thick door, its familiar numerals shining cruelly in the light from the streetlamps. “Please! All I ask is five minutes time!”

“I said get lost or I’m calling the police!”

Carl tugs on Sherlock’s coat sleeve until he moves away from the door. He pulls it from the boy’s grip and trudges angrily down the road, cursing under his breath.

“This is insane,” Sherlock growls, walking toward Marylebone Road. He keeps up the feeling of anger that is roiling inside him, snags onto it like a lifeline to keep from being dragged under by the fear that is creeping in around the edge of his thoughts.

Sherlock stops at a telephone box, thinks for a moment, then shuts himself inside. 

“It smells funny in here,” Carl says, and Sherlock has no idea how he’s slipped into the booth next to him. But he’s there all the same, leaning against the ad-covered pane of Plexiglass. “Not very roomy, either.” 

“Wasn’t really built for two,” Sherlock says. He picks up the receiver; Carl’s small hand comes up and pushes two coins into the slot. Sherlock looks down at him, brows furrowed.

“You’re welcome,” Carl says, wrinkling his nose.

Sherlock dials a number he didn’t even realise he’d memorised, holds his breath until he hears the line open on the other end.

“Hello?”

“Molly! Oh thank god. Listen –”

“I’m sorry, who is this?”

“It’s Sherlock. I’m calling from a public phone, so –”

“I – I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong number.”

Sherlock frowns into the dingy grey handset. 

“I’m positive I have the right number: Molly Hooper, pathologist at St. Bart’s.”

“Y-Yes, that’s me. But – who did you say you were?”

Sherlock rolls his eyes so hard he’s almost sure she can hear it.

“Sherlock Holmes. How many people do you know with that name? Stop playing games and tell me where we can meet up. Something strange is going on and I –”

“I don’t know anyone by that name, and I’m not meeting you anywhere. I’m sorry. Now please don’t call this number again, or –”

On her end of the line, Sherlock hears another voice, then the scraping and shuffling that tells him the phone is being put down, then changing hands. The voice that isn’t Molly’s is angry and male, and Molly’s voice moves into the background. 

“Robbie, no it’s just a wrong number,” she says. Sherlock doesn’t like the note of pleading in her voice. “Just hang up.”

“Oi!” the male voice – Robbie – shouts. Sherlock jolts, holding the earpiece away from himself in surprise. 

“Hello?” he says again.

“Yeah. Who the hell are you and why are you calling my girl asking to meet her?”

“I’m a friend of hers,” Sherlock says, stunned a bit by the aggressiveness of his tone.

“You some kind of stalker or something?”

“What – no, you idiot! I’m a colleague, we’ve worked together for –”

“So now you’re changing your story, huh? Listen. You call back again and I’ll find you and kick your mouth in so hard you’ll be shitting teeth for three weeks. Stay away from my Mols. You got it?” 

“There are several things inherently wrong with that plan, the least of which being you don’t even know what I look like,” Sherlock says in his usual rapid fire, “And how did Molly wind up with a pigheaded cretin like you? You’re not even her type!”

“Fuck right off!” Robbie screams into the phone. “Or I swear to god I’ll slit your throat!” 

“I’d like to see you try!” Sherlock shouts back.

But the line has gone dead.

Sherlock smashes the phone back down onto its cradle, kicks open the phone box door and slams it shut again. A few passers-by shoot him intensely disapproving looks and shuffle a little faster down the pavement away from him. He stands there, hands wrapped in fists, seething.

“Why has she glommed on to such a maggot? She deserves far better than that!” Sherlock all but shouts at Carl, who is back at his side seemingly unaffected by any door-slamming theatrics. He flicks a bottlecap into the gutter with his big toe. He gives Sherlock a rueful sidelong look, but otherwise keeps quiet. It’s all the explanation Sherlock needs. He doesn’t say it, but he was holding out a hope that Molly at least would be unaffected by his non-existence, or at least be better off.

The fear begins to outpace the anger, and Sherlock feels chilled to the point where his shoulders begin to shake. 

“You need to get in out of the cold for a while,” Carl says, noticing Sherlock’s poor attempt at suppressing his shivering. “Here’s as good a place as any.”

Carl tugs Sherlock’s arm again, until they come to a stop in front of a heavy black door with a small awning over it, touting its name as _The Watchman’s Post._

“It’s a pub,” Sherlock says to the boy. “You can’t go in.”

“They can’t see me,” Carl answers, and before Sherlock can protest, he walks in past him and scrambles up onto a stool at the bar with a slight effort. Sherlock follows and takes the seat next to him, trying ardently to ignore the child in his miniature suit and crooked tie, humming and swinging his legs, his naked toes barely brushing the bottom rung of the stool. Thankfully, the pub is mostly empty save for a few depressing characters tucked into the shadier corners. Sherlock can’t tell, however, if this is because it is not yet prime drinking hours, or if the pub isn’t the most lucrative or successful of businesses. The sky outside is still in its strange, grey limbo.

Sherlock is sure Carl is going to fall off his stool given the jigging around he’s doing, until the bartender turns around and Sherlock is almost unseated himself.

A familiar flash of silver hair beneath the dim lights almost makes him sigh out loud.

“Oh thank god, Lestrade,” Sherlock says, and is surprised at just how relieved he is to see a familiar face, especially after the conversation with Molly. “Something intensely strange is going on. I–” 

Sherlock stops, realising the oddness of the setting, Lestrade’s scowl, and his complete lack of familiar regard for Sherlock. In a quieter voice, Sherlock leans up on the bar toward him and asks, “Are you undercover?”

“Oh you think you’re real funny, don’t you?” Lestrade says crossly.

Sherlock frowns. “I am a great deal many things, Lestrade. ‘Funny’ is rarely if ever one of them. Are you? Because this is all much too...”

Lestrade isn’t having any of it. His face is stone as he folds his arms, and Sherlock needs to change his tack if he’s to get any information out of him.

“You on something?” Lestrade asks.

“No! I don’t even smoke, we’ve been –” _through this,_ Sherlock stops the words from falling off his tongue, because they haven’t apparently. Not here. It is even more starkly obvious now that Carl is telling him the truth.

“I’m not,” Sherlock answers instead, tamping down his frustration.

“Well, cheers, then,” Lestrade says, but doesn’t loosen his skeptical brow.

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock shams, realising he’s about a hair’s breadth from being tossed out on his arse. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I just saw the insignia up there on the mirror, figured you were on the force.”

Lestrade’s face softens just a bit, and Sherlock feels a thrill of triumph and a rush of fondness all at once. He’s the same old Lestrade. Sherlock gestures to the mirror behind the bar, and they both look to where a Met officer’s patch is pinned up under the frame. Still, Lestrade turns back to Sherlock with narrowed eyes. 

“That’s a trick if I ever saw one,” Lestrade says.

Sherlock bites the inside of his cheek to keep from hissing _It’s not a trick,_ instead settling for a restrained, “Hobby of mine.”

“So how’d you know my name, eh? I never seen you before in my life.”

Thinking fast, Sherlock says, “Health inspection license, hanging above the sink.” Sure enough, Lestrade’s name is listed as owner of the pub. “Lucky guess.” 

“Well,” he says, eyes still narrowed. “Don’t give you the right to talk to me like you know me, mate.”

 _I do know you, you idiot,_ shouts Sherlock in his mind. _You were the one who scraped me up off the floor and set me right. I’d never forget_ you, _you simple bastard._

“Again, apologies.” Sherlock orders a pint of bitter, even though his gut has become surprisingly churned-up at being unrecognised by Lestrade. He takes one tiny sip, then merely spends a few minutes staring down into its sudsy depths, cursing Carl inside his mind for leading him here, knowing the kid can hear him. Carl goes very quiet and still next to him.

“I used to be a cop,” Lestrade says, after a few more minutes of nothing but the sounds of traffic filtering in from outside, and the sedate murmur of his other sad-looking patrons.

Sherlock looks up at him. “What happened?” he asks, though now he’s much less sure if he wants to know the answer.

“I was a DI. I took too many chances, didn’t have enough proof to back them up,” Lestrade says, and though the statement is short, Sherlock can read the layers beneath it.

“I thought the Met would pride themselves on employing officers who are able to think critically,” says Sherlock. Apparently some things are immutable; unfortunately it is the stupidity of the NSY.

Lestrade looks down, rearranging some glasses in the dishwasher. “Yeah, well. They don’t take too kindly to the ones that can’t back up their risky hunches with hard evidence, even after it’s all but proven.” 

He has that scowl set on his face again, as if its made a home there. Sherlock doesn’t like it at all. Lestrade wasn’t a genius, but he was by no means an idiot. A lot could be said of his intuition – he always knew enough to call Sherlock in. Apparently his intuition wasn’t enough on its own. He’d never realised how much of a team he and Lestrade were until this moment. And now here they stood, the sticky wooden bar standing between them like the meanest, most insurmountable barricade.

Sherlock looks him over, takes in the defeated slope of his shoulders, the hard lines on his face, the dirty wedding band ringing his finger. He wonders which case was the one that became too much for Lestrade – one he would’ve been able to help him crack, instead of letting it break his spirit and lead him to languish and fall off the force.

“Pity,” Sherlock says. “I can tell just from looking at you that your instincts are usually spot-on.”

“Really,” says Lestrade sardonically.

“Yes,” Sherlock says, forgetting to school his behaviour into a caricature of appropriateness. “For instance, whatever you’ve been thinking your wife is doing behind your back, you’d be right.”

Lestrade’s face darkens as if a cloud has come over it.

“All right you _freak,_ that’s enough. Get the bloody fuck out of my pub and I don’t ever want to see you back around here, you understand?”

“But I –”

“OUT!” Lestrade shouts, and to make his point, he grabs for the baton hanging next to the last call bell. Sherlock needs no more convincing to make a beeline for the door; he’s seen Lestrade wield one of those, and it’s never a pretty outcome for the person on the receiving side of his blows. Sherlock is sure at least that hasn’t changed about him.

He walks fast down the pavement, putting distance between himself and the failed interaction with Lestrade. He needs information, facts, answers. He pats his pockets and remembers again that his phone isn’t on him.

“Data, data, data,” Sherlock chants. His breath leaves his mouth it great, grey whorls. Carl trots alongside him, trying to keep up with Sherlock’s much longer strides. Sherlock makes his way to a small café he used to use for pickups, which he knows has a row of old computers along its back wall that he can rent access to – ten minutes for a few quid. He drags the boy inside, plonks down the handful of change he found floating at the bottom of his pocket and just barely resists barking his request at the sour-looking man behind the counter. 

Sherlock’s eyes race across the screen in front of him, fingers flying in a mad clack of typing on the old keyboard. One after another, the results of his queries pop up, and each makes less sense than the last.

Six serial suicides in the winter between 2009 and 2010. No culprit was ever blamed or even searched for. Sherlock knows they only stopped because Jeff Hope’s brain aneurysm had finally decided his time was up.

Woman found dead in Belgravia townhouse. Mysterious circumstances, no forced entry, unsolved. 

Henry Knight’s obituary.

Peter Ricoletti still at large.

Kidnapped bank executive murdered by his captors.

Turner’s _Falls of the Reichenbach_ never found.

Sherlock stares at the pixelated headlines. He feels like he did on the moor, not being able to trust his mind because his eyes are lying to him. He takes a deep breath. Carl is sitting on the table next to him, cross-legged. The grumpy man at the counter looks over at them.

“He can’t see me,” Carl reminds him, answering Sherlock before he even thinks to ask the question. “Can’t hear you speak to me either.”

“This cannot be,” Sherlock says under his breath, just to be safe. 

But it is. Source after source confirms it: Sherlock finds nothing about bombings, or break-ins, or assassins. Moriarty’s trail, as far as Sherlock can trace it, ends after the Black Lotus and the forged Vermeer. The security breaches were never orchestrated; the children of the American diplomat never went missing. Sherlock realises it’s because Jim never found anyone else he wanted to play the game with. It makes something twist inside his stomach.

Hundreds of cases, unsolved. Dozens more lives never avenged or accusations vindicated. But on the other side of that coin, hundreds of other lives, never touched by his recklessness. People who would otherwise have had their lives wrenched apart are safe, cocooned inside their illusion of safety and contentment.

Sherlock feels hot all of a sudden, beneath his skin, like he’s going to be sick.

He leaves the café and walks, trying to rid himself of the feeling. He takes off his gloves and shakes out his hands in the cold air. But everything continues to feel sideways and fractured. He drops himself heavily onto a bench near a bus stop, curling forward over his crossed arms, makes an effort to regulate his breathing. He sees Carl slide himself soundlessly onto the opposite end of the bench out of the corner of his eye.

“It was supposed to be better without me,” Sherlock says, mostly to himself. “Or at the very least, not this bad. I couldn’t have made that much of a difference.”

“Everyone does,” Carl says. “You haven’t deleted chaos theory, I know that.”

“Rubbish,” Sherlock says. “I abhor the concept of coincidence.”

“It’s not coincidence. It’s cause and effect. You out of anyone should know that even the smallest detail, if set in the right context, isn’t inconsequential. Your attention to that has saved so many of us.”  

Sherlock sits back and twists to face him, suddenly irate. “I didn’t commit myself to my work to become some sort of saviour!” he shouts. “I did it to keep my mind from shredding itself to pieces. My motivations are always purely selfish.”   

“But you do care,” says Carl, and it is not a question. “Whether you’ll ever admit it or not. You convince yourself that you play the game for the game’s own sake. All you say you want is the work, the puzzles to solve – you fit the pieces together and you’re satisfied. But what made you want to know anything about it in the first place? What made you want to figure out what happened to me?”

Sherlock looks at the boy’s pale upturned face, the way his brows have come together in the middle of his forehead, the way his large teeth rest on the curve of his small bottom lip. It sets his face in the sort of sincere mix of curiosity and conviction that only children can convey successfully. Sherlock sags again, losing the desire to remain irritated.

“You were – we were just children,” Sherlock says quietly, the words coming as he remembers. “I didn’t know you, but perhaps we could have been friends, if I’d have known how to make any.” Sherlock looks down at his lap, where he is twisting his gloves in his hands. Carl moves closer to him on the bench; Sherlock feels the weight of him press against the side of his arm, though he can feel no warmth.

“I was fascinated with the mystery of it, yes,” Sherlock continues, “But I also remember being angry. Angry that _they_ didn’t care, that they wouldn’t see the simple logic, the facts laid out in front of them. They wouldn’t listen to me – maybe because I was just a kid, but probably more because what I was saying didn’t fit with the easier conclusion they’d invented. I never wanted another case to stay unsolved. You hadn’t a voice anymore – someone needed to speak for you. For all of them, even if it was just to say ‘I told you so’.”

“It means a lot, you know. To us,” Carl says. “Most of us are only remembered by our families – some don’t even have that much. But you remember. And you do care.”

“Caring isn’t an advantage,” Sherlock recites morosely.

“Maybe you weren’t looking for an advantage,” says Carl. “The truth doesn’t take sides.” 

Carl slides off the bench and stands in front of him. Sherlock glances up. The boy’s eyes are wide, and he looks hopeful, yet there’s something tight just beneath the surface that speaks of hesitance.

“It isn’t just about playing the game, and it isn’t just about finding out the truth. Not anymore – or at least, it hasn’t been for the past year and a half.” 

“I’ve already told you,” Sherlock says, pushing himself up from the bench and striding past the boy down the deserted pavement. “I’m no one’s hero – heroes don’t...” 

It comes to him all in a rush as if being doused in water – as if a floodlight has suddenly been illuminated in the dark.

_John._

Sherlock spins around and walks back to where Carl stands. He looks down at the boy, and knows he knows. He’s been leading him through the entire time. Wordlessly, Sherlock holds out his hand. Carl stares at it for a moment, apprehensive, not moving to take it. Instead, he tucks his arms into each other and tilts his face away.

“You’re not going to like it,” he says, and his voice is more weary than any child’s should ever be.

“I need to,” Sherlock says, barely able to keep his voice from sounding desperate. “I need to see him. Please. If this is where I am stuck, I – I have to know.”

Carl withdraws one small hand and wraps it around Sherlock’s wide palm. The street dissolves around them, and Sherlock finds himself hoping that, if no one else, at least John’s life is somehow better than the one he’d been part of, even though it makes him ache to his very core.

 

\---

 

When the world resolidifies around them, Sherlock is looking upon a squat, grey flat block. The word _barracks_ jumps into his mind as the only apt description. Carl walks over and stands in front of a particular door, which looks exactly the same as every other.

“This isn’t John’s flat,” Sherlock says, coming up beside him.

“Yeah, it is,” says Carl. 

Sherlock still doesn’t believe him, needs to see for himself. He walks around the rear of the building and finds a window has been left unlocked. Sherlock hoists himself up and jams the window open as far as it will go. He elbows in the screen and slides his body through.

“You know I could have just brought you inside,” Carl says. He is already standing in the middle of the deserted sitting room, hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels and wiggling his toes on the carpet.

“I prefer my own methods,” Sherlock answers haughtily.

The flat is neat, though of the sort that suggests minimal use rather than fastidiousness. It is smaller and slightly more shabby than 221B. It isn’t in a terrible neighborhood, either. But something about it feels off. This isn’t a place he can picture John living. 

He goes through, knowing immediately which bedroom is John’s. Here is his RAMC mug on the bedside table, here is his laptop on the desk, here is his cane leaning up against the chair.

Oh.

“He spends most of his time in his room,” Carl says, running a finger along the spines of the books on John’s shelf. “His flatmate is – well, they’re not friends.”

“He’s a smoker,” Sherlock observes, sniffing the air. “He has his mates over at all hours without asking or caring that John has work in the morning. He eats all of John’s food and doesn’t do the washing up, and has a girlfriend on whom he cheats constantly. Why on earth would John bear living with such a sod?”

“It was all he could afford.”

“What about the other people he’s met? Surely a man like John would have been able to shack up with any of his revolving tray of women.” _Without me demanding his time,_ says a small voice in his head, unbidden.

Carl shakes his head. 

“He spends most of his time at the surgery, and the rest cleaning up after Harry’s messes. He’s too embarrassed to date because of his leg, and. You know.”

Carl gestures to the computer.

Sherlock opens it and finds John’s blog. He scrolls all the way back – but there are only two pages of entries for the two-year span of time he’d been back from Afghanistan. Missing were the pages upon pages of cases, anecdotes about women he’d been dating, life at 221B, explications of Sherlock’s annoying habits. Instead there are nine paltry offerings, some only two or three lines long. There is no entry for the day they met. On the date when they were held hostage by Moriarty at the pool, there was no tense, exciting story but a few sentences alluding to a nightmare John had the night before. The next entry is months later, and it is only a vague complaint about his flatmate’s disregard for housework. There was no mention of the Woman, or the trip to Devon, no comments from Molly with tiny pictograms of hearts in the text.

It is horrifyingly bland, and Sherlock’s heart begins to hurt.

The John in this life is not the John he should be, the John he helped fix, the John he trusted his heart to and gave his life for. This John is all wasted potential. He should have been out vanquishing serial killers and intimidating suspects and arguing with Sherlock about what to eat for dinner. He is still the same John, Sherlock knows, because he always had been. But here he was like an inert chemical lacking its catalyst, staying dormant and devoid of reaction.

“This – this is...” Sherlock, for once, cannot find words to describe what he feels.

Carl looks sad, doesn’t meet Sherlock’s eyes. He tugs on Sherlock’s hand, and suddenly they are on the pavement outside the flat again.

John emerges from around the corner, stepping carefully along the path, leaning heavily on his walking stick. Sherlock’s heart feels like it stops completely for the space of a breath. John heads toward the door and turns as he fumbles in his pocket for his key with shaky hands; before Sherlock can look away or move someplace else, John’s eyes meet his.

“Morning,” John says. It is friendly on the surface, but Sherlock can tell it is being faked, and painfully. “New to the block, mate?”

“Uh, yes.” Sherlock struggles to regulate his breathing, which is coming much too slow, and his heart which is now beating much too fast. Looking at John and seeing no recognition in his face for Sherlock, no fond, familiar smile, no ease of posture makes the backs of his eyes prickle with pain. His hands ache to be placed on John’s shoulders, grab his wrists, cup around the back of his neck and push his fingers up through the wispy blonde hair. To shake him and say _Please John, it’s me, you know me,_ even though he knows it won’t work.

But instead, Sherlock merely holds out his hand.

“Sherlock Holmes,” he says. John steps toward him from the door and takes it warily, and it is even more painful when Sherlock realises the callouses and smooth spots are all the same except for the heel of his palm, where the handle of his walking stick rests.

“John Watson.”

He cannot let him walk away, go back inside that tomb of a flat. Sherlock knows now that this world is not a trick or a lie – and with the same conviction he knows there exists no version of any world that could keep him away from John. Of that, Sherlock is sure. Even if this John hasn’t the slightest idea who he is.

Certain things must remain the same. They _must._

“This may seem a strange request,” Sherlock says, the words fairly bursting forth from him as John turns to walk away. “But could you tell me the way to the nearest hospital?”

John frowns. “Are you ill?”

“No – I just figured you’d know, since you’re a doctor.”

John takes a half-step backward. “Wh – how did you know that?” The concerned lines on his forehead deepen, and Sherlock sees the knuckles of the hand wrapped around his walking stick flex and go white.

“I’m a consulting detective by trade,” Sherlock goes on, unable to stop himself. “I know you’re ex-RAMC, invalided home from Afghanistan a few years ago. I know your limp is psychosomatic and you resent your therapist. I know you work locum at the surgery near Gower Street and pick up every extra shift you can, not because you need the money – which you do – but because you hate your flatmate, yet can’t bear to leave London. I know you have a sibling named Harry, that is your sister, not your brother, and she has a drinking problem that keeps you from being close to her. But I don’t need to cite my profession to know that you take your tea with sugar but your coffee without, you like to sleep in on Sunday mornings and always read the sport section of the news first and the advice columns last, and that there’s a spot right between your scapulae you like to have knuckled by someone with large hands because it eases the pain in your shoulder.”

John stares at him. Sherlock catches the breath he didn’t seem to know he’d lost and snaps his mouth shut. He waits for the muscles in John’s face to loosen, for the light he loves to open his eyes and part his lips. He waits for the _extraordinary_ to come.

But it doesn’t.

In fact, John’s face grows even tighter and darker than it had been.

“Is this some kind of fucking joke?” John says, and there is no warmth in his voice, faked or not. “Who’ve you been talking to? What the hell are you playing at?”

“I – I’m,” Sherlock stutters. His stomach drops, and everything in it turns to ice. He feels an unseen weight tugging on his arm.

“I don’t know who you are or where you came from,” John says, and his voice is sharp as a knife’s blade and just as frighteningly cold, “Or why you know all that about me. But do yourself a favour mate, and _piss off._ ”

John turns around and marches back toward his doorstep lopsidedly, the deep lines of the frown never leaving his face.

“John, wait!”

John stops, spinning on his heel. 

“I know you. I do. Please.” Sherlock has no idea what he’s begging for, just that he feels as if he must.

“I’d think I’d remember if I ever met someone like you.” The disgust is plain in his voice as he says the last word.

“Please,” he says again, and reaches out to touch John’s shoulder, as he has so many times before. But before Sherlock’s fingertips even brush the familiar black fabric, John rears back and rocks his fist into Sherlock’s face. Sherlock’s vision goes white and he hears the bridge of his nose crack and shatter, and hot blood pours instantly down his lips and chin. He staggers backward, then lists to the right, finally giving up and dropping hard to his knee on the pavement, trying to stem the flow of blood by shoving his nose in the crook of his elbow.

“Don’t touch me,” John says, pointing a threatening finger at him. Though his nose feels like it’s just exploded, and his eyes are streaming, he can see John’s face. There is nothing behind his eyes but the ghosts of war and bitterness. “And don’t fucking follow me again or I’ll lay you out cold. If you’re still here when I come back out, I’m calling the police.”

John turns and limps away, his cane stumping aggressively against the pavement. When he closes the door on Sherlock, it feels like a gunshot to his chest.

“John,” Sherlock chokes on the name, gurgled through the flow of blood down his sinuses. He tries to call after him again, but the sound gets stuck in his throat and will not dislodge. He sags until he sinks to both his knees. Carl is standing over him. Everything at the edges of his periphery goes slowly dark, and the world is now as if they are simply a vignette, in a small island of light beneath the lamp on the side of the building. Everything else is an ocean of shadow.

Sherlock’s face is wet, and not only with blood. He lets his neck bend until his chin is almost touching his chest. He gives his nose one last swipe with his coat sleeve, then lets his arms fall limp at his sides, knuckles scraping carelessly on the cold concrete.

“It worked, it did,” he hears himself murmur. “It worked the very first day we met. He said it was _extraordinary._ He said it made him want to know me so badly, know my mind, how it worked. Do you know what that felt like for me, to hear those words? It was the closest anyone’s ever come to saying they loved me.”

 _Until he actually did,_ Sherlock remembers, like a spark igniting a flame inside his mind. _The night he laid me out on the couch. He said he’d love me until the day he died. I wasn’t supposed to hear, but I did. And John Watson is not a liar. If nothing else, I was meant to exist for that moment alone._

Sherlock tangles his fingers in his hair.

“Take me back,” he says.

Carl is silent.

“I said, _take me back._ I don’t want to be here any longer.”

“I can’t,” Carl says. His voice is very small, and for the first time, he actually sounds like the child he is.

“What do you mean, you can’t?” Sherlock snaps his head up. “You’re the one who brought me here.”

“You brought yourself here,” he says. “Remember? I wasn’t the one who made the deal with him, let him pull you off the bridge.”

“This place is not real. It isn’t, it can’t be. Nothing makes sense. This is – this is _hell,_ ” Sherlock says.

He pushes himself up and staggers into the darkness. The little circle of light floats behind him, getting further and further away with no heed to his pace or physics.

Carl stands in the light and watches him go. 

Jim’s face looms out of the shadows that move around him. Sallow and sharp, large eyes and a threatening smirk. Waiting for Sherlock to come running back to him.

Sherlock feels Jim’s hand close around his own again, clasping tight.

“Had enough yet?” he purrs. “There’s no one here to save you now.” His voice comes from inside Sherlock’s own head.

Sherlock knows he is right. He’s alone. Whatever degradation this is has succeeded, and all the stubbornness and certainty that would usually well up in him does not rise. He deserves this, he thinks. He’d said terrible things, and they’d come true. It is his own fault – he chose this punishment himself.

He wishes, desperate and futile, that John was here with him. Even if it meant him witnessing Sherlock’s death. He only wants to be able to see John just one more time before he is dragged down into the dark. 

He does not want to die alone.

And unloved.

Suddenly there is a burst of light in front of his eyes. It is tactile, it seems – it presses against him and forces his whole body backward and he is floating, suspended as if underwater.

He pulls his hand away, peels Jim’s skin away from his own.

A growling, feral scream explodes between his ears. But the light keeps expanding, pushing him away from the terrible noise.

The light fades and resolves itself into a shape, like a gossamer cloth clinging to the small human form beneath it. Carl opens his eyes. Sherlock reaches for him, but the boy floats just out of his reach.

“Go!” he says, bright and clear in Sherlock’s head. “He’s finished. It worked, you’ve done it.”

“What about you? I can’t leave you.”

Carl smiles, the gap in his front teeth on full display.

“You didn’t,” Carl says. “This is just me returning the favour.”

Sherlock feels his body begin to float up and up and up through the murky haze, and he tries to keep his eyes on Carl until he can see nothing but total and complete darkness. He gives over, then, and lets his muscles go limp as he closes his eyes.


	3. Three.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apologies this took so long, on top of taking so long. Enjoy.

Sherlock’s body feels cold, and very heavy. His coat is sodden with stinking river water, and his curls are matted to his head. His shoes and socks are gone, and his long, pale feet stick out incongruously from his dark trousers, slicked with muck and brown blood from the sharp stones and garbage he now lies upon. He is very still.

He opens his eyes just as he feels the burning in his throat, and rolls himself over enough to let a stomachful of brownish grey water pour out of his mouth. He gasps and coughs and spits, and pushes himself stubbornly to sitting. He whips his head around, looking for someone – someone was just with him, he is sure of it – but he is alone. The sky is the steel grey-blue of impending dawn, and London is sedate. Sherlock takes a deep breath, then another, and then he tries his voice.

“John.”

He looks up into the sky. It is beginning to snow.

Sherlock is shivering like mad now, and he’s soaked straight through to his skin. But he gets his feet beneath him and wraps his coat around him, and staggers, dripping and shaking, up the bank toward the road. He is muddled, disoriented, and so recites to himself the solid facts:

“I am wet, and cold. And barefoot. And it is snowing. It’s –”

Sherlock stops.

“It’s Christmas day, isn’t it,” he says, and though he shivers, a bloom of warmth begins to unfurl in his chest. Somewhere close and getting ever closer, he hears the familiar wail of sirens. He climbs up from the riverbank and stumbles onto the road, and suddenly there are lights all around him, blue and red, and behind him the muted glow of the sun just peeking out from between the buildings of the city. He smiles.

“Sherlock!”

A cacophony of voices bursts out to his left, and out of a pair of police cars tumbles a motley assortment of people. John is the first Sherlock sees, and in that moment, the rest don’t matter. He stands up very straight and holds his hands out as if to say, _ta-da!_

But John is having none of it.

His face is set like stone, and he lunges at Sherlock’s middle, and for a moment he is sure John means to tackle him to the ground in anger again, but the tipping over never comes, and Sherlock finds himself wrapped around the middle by John Watson’s arms.

“John,” he says, and it earns him a tighter squeeze that feels so nice, he says his name again.

“Jesus Christ,” John mumbles into Sherlock’s chest.

“It’s Christmas, John. And I’m wet and cold and my nose is not broken and it’s _snowing,_ ” Sherlock rattles off excitedly, even though all of those things are completely obvious. It’s the most triumphant deduction he’s ever made, because it means he’s alive, and so is John, and John _knows_ him again. Sherlock pushes John gently, just enough so that he can look at his face.

“I thought you were gone,” says John.

“I was,” Sherlock says. “But I’m not anymore.”

“Where’ve your shoes got to?” John asks, looking him over. Sherlock shrugs, but lets him manoeuvre them both to sitting on the kerb. “You’re in shock.”

“No, I’m not, things have never been more clear.” Sherlock reaches up and grabs John’s hands where they’re automatically checking Sherlock’s head for bumps and wounds. “You said you’d love me until the day you died.”

John’s hands finally go still. In fact his whole body goes rigid, and he stares at Sherlock with wide eyes.

“I –” John fumbles. “I didn’t –”

“You did. But I got you one better because I loved you ‘til the day I died, and now here I am, the day after, and I still love you, and I don’t think I’m ever going to stop. I just thought you should know.”

John’s eyes remain very big, though when he finally does blink, one big fat tear rolls out of each, which he hastily swipes away with the heel of his hand.

“John,” Sherlock sits back. “I didn’t intend to upset you, I –”

“I thought you were _gone,_ ” John says again, and the way his voice comes out this time pierces something deep inside Sherlock. He understands, remembers his black mood and what they’d said to each other and cannot think of a way to tell John it’s all right, cannot think of words that will make him know how sorry he is. He has never been good at apologies, and he owes John so many, thousands maybe. Just then Sherlock feels a pressure on his back, as if someone has placed their hands there and is pushing. So he leans forward, and John leans into him.

Their lips touch, soft at first, and then John is holding Sherlock’s head in his hands and pressing their faces together, his mouth smudging against Sherlock’s, hot and desperate and joyful. Sherlock’s heart is beating fit to burst, and he can’t keep up with it, so after a moment of bumping noses and teeth he just lets John kiss his face over and over, and his breath is a warm cloud that smells of home.

Then John wraps his arms around Sherlock squeezing him so nicely again, and buries his face in Sherlock’s neck. So Sherlock does the same, even though he is wet, and getting John wet as well. John doesn’t seem to care.

“I don’t want to know what a world without you in it is like,” John says. His stubble is pleasantly scratchy against the side of Sherlock’s face, and his breath is warm on his skin.

“You really don’t,” agrees Sherlock.

 Sherlock cradles the back of John’s neck in one of his big hands, letting his fingers rake up through his short, wispy hair. He likes the feeling of John against him like this, and hopes it is something they are allowed to continue to do even when Sherlock’s life has not just been endangered. He closes his eyes to enjoy it.

When he opens them again, he sees a boy across the road, sitting on the concrete steps that lead to the courtyard of a block of flats. He’s mousy and freckled, and tall for his age, and at the moment fully engrossed in tying perfect bows on his brand new pair of trainers. When he tightens the last knot, he sits up and admires the way they fit his feet. Then he jumps down the stairs onto the pavement.

He catches Sherlock’s eye and points down at his newly bedecked feet, tilting his head and grinning as if asking, _What do you think?_

Sherlock smiles, wide and real, in answer. _They’re perfect._

He gives Sherlock a little nod and bounces happily on the balls of his feet.

In the space of a blink, Carl is gone.

“What are you looking at?” John asks. He’s pulled away a bit, looking up at Sherlock’s face, amusingly puzzled. Sherlock grins and shakes his head.

“Nothing. Just a thought.”

John kisses him again, just lightly, on the corner of his mouth.

“Come on, then,” he says. “Let’s get you home.”

Sherlock just barely stops himself from saying, _I already am._

 

\---

 

It’s not the best Christmas party 221B will ever be host to, but it is by far better than last year. Much less death. Sherlock pads around the flat in his tartan dressing gown, letting John make a fuss over him. He is on his best behaviour since he’d convinced John not to cancel. Lestrade and Molly show up, and Sherlock makes a point of telling her that the shade of her red dress compliments the blue undertones of her skin. She only looks puzzled for a moment before understanding it as a compliment, and bends down to give him a small, fond kiss on his cheek.

Sherlock is at his desk, being contentedly unsocial as he scrolls through tabs and tabs of articles. John’s blog is open in a separate window, and he goes back to it every now and again, just happy that it is there in its entirety, and that it matches up with each date of each corresponding news story.

His email pings when John sits down next to him. John is pleasantly drunk, ruddy in his cheeks and all of his smiles come soft around the edges. Beneath the table, Sherlock feels John’s warm hand rest on his knee. He slips his own hand down and covers John’s with his own. He wants that weight, that anchor to stay just a moment longer. Next to them, Mrs. Hudson sips her glass of wine and listens as Harry trades her a story about a trip to California for the one Mrs. Hudson had just told about her time in Florida. Lestrade and Molly are settled on the couch, sitting much too close and laughing far too often.

Sherlock opens the email.

> _You’re quite right about the unexpectedness, but it’s not at all unwelcome. I had honestly been meaning to ring you up since seeing your name in the papers. Cheers to that, by the way! Always had a knack for it – glad to see it’s come of good use._
> 
> _Things have been rather different since dad passed away. He’d changed since he had the stroke that summer. But toward the end I do think he came around. More, at least, than I’d expected. He even attended the ceremony. I still feel guilty for not speaking my mind sooner, but as I’m sure you know, things have to happen in a certain way in order for the outcome to be right. I have to say again how sorry I am, even though it’s just words._
> 
> _In any case, if you’re not averse, I’d like to meet up. Alexander and I will be in London come the end of January. Perhaps we can treat you to a belated birthday dinner. (He can tell you all about his_ apis mellifera _specimens. Seems like something you’d like, and I hope you do because he won’t shut up about them anyway, the darling git.)_
> 
> _Merry Christmas to you (and John),_
> 
> _Victor_         

A throat cleared in the doorway snaps his attention away from the screen.

Mycroft is standing primly framed there, umbrella dangling from his elbow as he tucks away his phone with one hand and holds up a box with the other.

“Is that – a tin of biscuits?” John says, and the bemusement on his face at this sight is the best gift Sherlock could have asked for.

Mycroft merely gives one of his wry smiles and places the tin down on the coffee table.

“Oh my – Peyton and Byrne?” Molly says, eyeing the lid. “They’ve been sold out for days, and all booked on special orders for a month!”

“Yes, well,” Mycroft says nonchalantly as he takes a seat in John’s chair, resting his umbrella carefully against the arm. “My position holds a few sterling perks.”

“Understatement of the decade,” John says to Sherlock, low but loud enough for Mycroft to arch an eyebrow at him.

“Of course _you_ would use said perks to procure desserts,” Sherlock says. But there is no spite in it, no barbs upon the words, and Sherlock knows Mycroft has noticed. He sits back in John’s chair, crossing one long leg over the other and setting his arms upon the rests. He looks like a captain at the helm of a ship, but his expression is serene and a little embarrassed for being so. John goes to offer him a drink, and Sherlock says nothing further to him.

They merely exchange a look, and it says more than a hundred paltry words could.

Mycroft is forty-two and sitting in his flat, and for the first time Sherlock is almost happy to see him there. He closes the laptop and crosses over to the window, on which his violin case rests. He draws it out and tucks it under his chin, places his bow lightly upon the string. The room, which had been filled with chatter and laughing, falls slowly quiet.

He plays.

 

\---

 

Later, when everyone has gone and he has convinced John to leave the tidying for Boxing Day, he will listen to the sound of John in the shower. Sherlock will be sitting on his bed, the soft fabric of John’s bathrobe bunched in his hands. It smells of him, and Sherlock steals a moment to bury his nose in it, to bask in the warmth of familiarity and silly sentiment.

He thinks perhaps sentiment isn’t as silly when it comes to John. It is also Christmas after all; he can blame his momentary lapse on that distraction.

He will look up when he realises the shower has stopped, and John will slide the door open and pop his head and one arm out from behind the pebbled glass.

Sherlock will stand with a flourish and go toward the far window, holding up the old blue thing by the shoulders like a matador’s cape.

“Oh,” he will say, “This is an interesting situation.”

“Sherlock,” John will say, giving him that look that is only half-menacing. “Give me my robe.”

Sherlock will pout and shake his head.

“I swear I’ll start shouting if you don’t.”

“Of course you won’t. You’d wake Mrs. Hudson.”

John will grump and plead and threaten and huff exasperatedly, and it will become harder and harder for Sherlock to keep a straight face.

“Fine,” John will say, “I’ll just march back up to my room in the nude, but it’ll be on you if I catch my –”

“Stay with me tonight,” Sherlock will say abruptly, trying to make it not sound so unsure, just so slightly tinged with a need he can’t name. He won’t quite succeed, but it will make John smile nevertheless. He’ll dip his head bashfully and slide the door open.

Sherlock will stare.

Then he’ll come back to himself with a shake of his head. He’ll hold out the robe to John. John will walk across the room to him (this will only take a few seconds, but it will feel like much, much longer) and take the robe without letting his eyes leave Sherlock’s.

But he won’t put it on.

They’ll pass the night in Sherlock’s bed, folded into each other, skin against skin. Sherlock will breathe quietly against the slope of John’s sleep-warm shoulder. He will marvel at this man, this one human out of so many that has come to mean so much to him. Who shined light into the empty spaces in himself he didn’t even notice were there. Who filled up his life and his mind with things he never thought he needed, or deserved to have.

Friendship, love. Care.

Sherlock won’t remember falling asleep, but he’ll wake up and John will still be there.

 

\---

 

That all comes later, however.

Right now, he plays, eyes closed, slowly navigating around furniture and guests seamlessly. He belongs in this place; his life wraps around him like a well-made suit of clothes. He knows he’ll be haunted by the memory of what it was like without him, what it was like without _them,_ and though he keeps thinking that it should have been an ego trip to see how many lives he alone had impacted – it doesn’t actually feel that way. He’s been given something: it was as much a gift as it was a warning, and he is smart enough to know what that means.

What Sherlock does feel is a humble gratitude that he _fits,_ and that out of all possible and probable outcomes, the picture of his life has come to look like this.

 

\- the end -

**Author's Note:**

> (Non-beta'd, non-Brit-picked. Apologies for mistakes, and I beg your forgiveness for that YOLO joke. I am terrible. This is now complete. Oh, and Merry Christmas, three and a half months late.)


End file.
